FileZilla and passwords
Tue, 2008.06.10 - 09:13 — müzso
I've been using FileZilla for ages now, but in the recent 3.x versions I had problems with password handling. The bookmarks feature is called "Site Manager" here. Each bookmark in Site Manager has a "logontype" parameter which can have a value of "Anonymous", "Normal", "Ask for password", "Interactive" and "Account". Without documentation (since FileZilla does not have any) it's not trivial to find out what each of these does.
"Anonymous" is not hard to guess: it tries to log on you with the "anonymous" username and without any password. "Normal" means you've to specify the password in the bookmark, which is of course not a very clever thing to do, but I'm sure many people love the comfort this option gives them.
Now the difference between "Ask for password" and "Interactive" is a bit tricky and I didn't bother to find it out ... not until today. The former means FileZilla asks you the password during logon and it remembers the password during the session. The latter means it asks for the password ... and asks again for every new connection to the server. So if you've set 3 for the number of simultaneous transfers and drag a batch of files to your machine from the remote server, then FileZilla will ask you for the password every time it makes a new connection ... up til it reaches the max. number of simultaneous transfers. There's a checkbox in the login dialog box to "Remember password for this session", but in the Interactive logon type it does not do much.
The last logon type is "Account". Selecting this enables the "Account" field in the bookmark's settings. This account type is for FTP only, SFTP does not have support for it. To tell the truth I'm not quite sure what this one does. Looking at FileZilla's source makes me think that the account name is an optional feature of the FTP protocol. Maybe it allows to log in with multiple accounts and the same username+password. Or maybe not.
"Anonymous" is not hard to guess: it tries to log on you with the "anonymous" username and without any password. "Normal" means you've to specify the password in the bookmark, which is of course not a very clever thing to do, but I'm sure many people love the comfort this option gives them.
Now the difference between "Ask for password" and "Interactive" is a bit tricky and I didn't bother to find it out ... not until today. The former means FileZilla asks you the password during logon and it remembers the password during the session. The latter means it asks for the password ... and asks again for every new connection to the server. So if you've set 3 for the number of simultaneous transfers and drag a batch of files to your machine from the remote server, then FileZilla will ask you for the password every time it makes a new connection ... up til it reaches the max. number of simultaneous transfers. There's a checkbox in the login dialog box to "Remember password for this session", but in the Interactive logon type it does not do much.
The last logon type is "Account". Selecting this enables the "Account" field in the bookmark's settings. This account type is for FTP only, SFTP does not have support for it. To tell the truth I'm not quite sure what this one does. Looking at FileZilla's source makes me think that the account name is an optional feature of the FTP protocol. Maybe it allows to log in with multiple accounts and the same username+password. Or maybe not.
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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License. My posts reflect my personal opinion and shall not be associated with any of my employers.
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